Bing and Yahoo’s public admission that they are going to start valuing social media relevancy more and more highly in their search engine rankings has people worried about content. The idea that “likes” will replace links in terms of search engine prioritization, and what that might do the content quality. The fear that now, a bunch of terrible sites can get a bunch of “likes” and rank highly regardless.
Yes. Perhaps. But think of what that means? Who’s liking bad content? If anything, this is a trend that should lead to much much better content. Because there are ways to cheat any system. And a “like” is, for all intents and purposes, a good social signal that your content is being respected by your community. And if it’s not, they’ll stop “liking” you.
I think this could very well be a positive turning point for both content providers and users alike.